Website!
Mr. Wide recently introduced me to SSTV through this Robot36 android app while I was enjoying me some VRChat.
After that I became fascinated with SSTV and wanted to create my own encoder and decoder.. So I wanted to try and make a VRChat avatar that did SSTV over the microphone. VRChat only exposes oculus viseme percentages and voice volume.
That means I can't encode data as difference frequencies like Robot36 does. My only options are those visemes or the voice volume. My first approach was to use the visemes, but I couldn't figure out any reliable way to trigger specific visemes.
I then moved on to the voice volume which was very easy to control, with the downside of it being heavily smoothed. At this point, I still hadn't fully given up on visemes, and was trying to use them for signaling the start of a line.
As you can see, that didn't work very consistently. and sometime not at all.
This was also when I found out that the voice volume was smoothed, when I tried to up the speed at which it played the audio at.
Since the voice volume was smoothed, it would blur out large changes in brightness. After that at some point, I remaped the brighness range from 0-1 volume to 0-0.9 and left anything above that as the reset line signal, to prevent the inconsistent visemes.
After that not much happened, I had a bunch of people hang around while I was debugging. We took a group photo to try and print.
Thanks to Nesterboy and krajsyboys for helping me with figuring out how to use CRTs. The day after I wanted to try to get color working.
The first attempt, wasn't great... But! it was something. I eventually got the colors looking a little nicer, and never really got them any better what you see here.
These images are a little cherry-picked, it really doesn't do well with a lot of color images, and it just gets washed out.
Thanks Vole
I had asked a friend to model me a little fax machine for this.
But we started running into some weird issues with blender making these ugly edges when trying to bake in ambient occlusion.
So uh.. turn off the denoiser when baking I guess?
Added some paper, and we're done with that! Then I got that in unity and was pretty much done.
I had one last thing I wanted to mess with. Since VRChat doesn't give me anything other that volume and visemes I wanted to try to get it to play "music" while printing. My terrible "solution" for this, was turning an audio file into a constant volume sqaure wave
turning it into this horrible looking thing in audacity
This did have a negative effect on the image quality, but I think it is well worth it considering it's "epicness"
I now present to you a rendition of Merry-Go-Round Of Life by Joe Hisaishi on my VRChat Fax machine, while printing out an image of Mr. Wide
For good messure, here's Fax Machine next to the fax machine
I messed around with sending images over OSC as well, it was a LOT faster than over voice, but it's a lot less fun.
